Companies discovered a long time ago that utilizing hip-hop culture -- the musicians, the clothing, the lifestyle, the accoutrements -- is the ticket to selling products to teenagers. Sprite's sales skyrocketed after it launched its "Obey Your Thirst" campaign geared to urban youth. When Tommy Hilfiger's clothes became popular with rappers, his sales shot into the billion-dollar range. McDonald's just signed Justin Timberlake, the poster boy of white soul, to do a hip-hop jingle, produced by the superstar duo the Neptunes. While most hip-hop advertising is an attempt to attract both those who live the hip-hop lifestyle and those who just covet it -- the Army is specifically targeting black youth with their new Source-sanctioned campaign. Since everyone else is marketing with hip-hop -- and since it works -- why shouldn't the Army?
A majority of African-American kids are hip-hop fans, so marketing with hip-hop just makes good business sense, says Vital's Anthony. "[This campaign says] 'We want to come to your environment instead of trying to get you to come to ours,'" he says. "The Army wants to better understand your community." (It helps that all of Vital's employees are young and black, Anthony says. "The African-American market is more responsive to marketing that's communicated to them through people who look like them. There's more of a trust factor there.")
Everything about the campaign, down to the headbands and Army jerseys, should send that message. "Those are big fashion statements in the urban community right now, but before [Vital] was involved, those types of premiums didn't exist," says Anthony. "We're trying to make the Army more relevant and utilize more of these trends. If we make Army apparel a part of their wardrobe, it just creates a connection. They're able to see the brand in a different light, as cool."
Vital has big plans for the partnership with the Source. It doesn't stop with the Campus Combat Tour: Vital hopes to use the 488,000-circulation subscription list for direct-marketing campaigns, create some cross-branded Web sites, throw more Source-branded events, and possibly even appear in the editorial content of the magazine; eventually, there may be reader contests in which the winners will appear in the Source.
Right now, the partnership is in a test period, says Anthony, to "see how the relationship bears fruit," but both the Army and the Source say they hope to expand the tour next year. And Vital wants to partner with other "urban platforms," like Vibe magazine and BET -- albeit cautiously. "We don't want to come out of the gate seeming as if we're trying to buy our way into urban culture," Anthony says, "and we don't want our media partner to be perceived as if they're selling out for money."
But what if that happens? "We've just got to try and position this as a monumental shift in the U.S. Army's ideology in approaching urban youth," he says.
Besides the Source tour in the Northeast and the nationwide Taking It to the Streets campaign, Vital produces another recruitment tool for the Army, a comedy tour that travels to historically black colleges in the Southeast. But Campus Combat is the only tour with another well-known and respected brand attached. And that's critical: It's not easy to convince a bunch of African-American teens that the Army might be their best career choice, but with the Source, the oldest and best-known hip-hop magazine, behind it, the Army gains some much-needed street cred.
"It gets us access," says Col. Nickerson, of the Army-Source partnership.
It makes sense that the Army's looking to hip-hop to attract urban youth, says Craig Werner, a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "They know that to sell themselves they need to plug in with the culture," he says. "The Army has been the most egalitarian institution in the U.S., bar none, since the desegregation during the Korean War. If an African-American kid is looking for a career in which talent and character will be rewarded, there's no better place than the Army. Having said that, I find the whole thing pretty disgusting. It's an attempt to capitalize on desperation. We've created a job market in which [young African-Americans] don't have a damn chance."
The overrepresentation of minorities in the Army is often cited as proof of the continuing struggle for people of color in the mainstream economy. The Army needs to target ethnic groups, says Kendall Martin, account supervisor at Muse Cordero Chen, because it needs to "mirror" the country. "The Army wants to make sure it improves on representing all groups," he says. "The Army wants to look like America."
But the Army doesn't really look like America, and with a volunteer service, it never will. And considering that one of the Army's main draws is money for college, it's definitely not economically diverse; kids who don't need those incentives aren't as enticed to enlist.
"If you're a middle-class black kid, you're not enlisting, any more than any middle-class white kid is enlisting," Werner says. "The Army has nothing to do with the general profile of American culture. It's lower middle class, disproportionately black and brown, and disproportionately Southern and rural."
Nickerson says he doesn't have any information on the socioeconomic demographics of the Army's enlisted men. "We don't focus on economic backgrounds," he says. "If you qualify to join the Army, I don't care what your economic or social status is."
Since the campaigns tailored to minorities were launched only this past year, it's too soon to measure their impact. But the Army has hit its quota of enlistees -- before deadline -- three years in a row.
"I think you underestimate the commitment of young Americans," Nickerson says, when I ask how the Army can possibly hit its numbers given the combative state of global affairs. (After all, you've got to wonder if the flashy ad campaigns and free headbands will keep recruitment numbers up as the body count in Iraq continues to rise.) "We've got the best recruiting force in the world. We've got a soft economy, and we've got opportunities that resonate with young Americans."
Next page: "Even if Jay-Z was passing out enlistment papers, I'm not joining"